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Innovation conundrum

Coordinating people is hard; I think it’s the next step from giving away information that allows for wealth creation in particular niches.

Even if you have a small group of enthusiasts who are discovering how to clobber a particular set of problems, once a subset of those have become trivialized hardships ensue: who’s going to do the now boring work? Or take the now easily grasped fruits of work?

In the digital/computing realm, there’s still enough stuff that needs to get done out there that this is no big issue. In the physical realm, the issue is further complicated by lack of access to raw material that enables the execution.

Being able to work out deals or mechanisms that allow people to feel content doing their part, enabling the exploitation of “already solved” areas without hindering the discovery of new solutions is very valuable. Companies with good R&D departments that help the business thrive while not suffocating innovation manage to do it.

In order to be able to share wealth properly, we need to find good solutions to this innovation conundrum, which can be summed up in two points:

solutions make whole areas at the same time boring and exciting (for different kinds of people)

tensions arise in resource allocation, both between parties that want to exploit the newly discovered improvements and between the “exploiting” and “innovating” camps.